Before there was World War II, there was World War II. That is to say, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, there were rumblings of the impending conflict; not for nothing have some scholars characterized World War I and World War II as the same war, with a 20-year period of relative quiet between the two. And often those rumblings turned into full-tilt wars themselves.

In Asia, for instance, Japan, having already conquered Manchuria, invaded China in 1937. The invasion and the ensuing eight years of occupation were accompanied by savagery the likes of which the world has rarely seen. The Japanese protagonist of Jiang Wen’s moving film Guizi lai le (Devils on the Doorstep) is unapologetic; asked by his Chinese civilian captors whether he had personally killed Chinese, he answers, “Of course—that’s what I came here to do!” Jiang’s film won the Grand Jury Prize and the Palme d’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, but for all that the film is too little seen outside China.

The Rape of Nanjing has become emblematic of the Second Sino-Japanese War: most of the victims of the Japanese aerial and ground assault on the old southern imperial capital were noncombatants, and in the weeks that followed the fall of Nanjing, another 300,000 civilians, by some estimates, were massacred. The events at Nanjing are seared into national memory in China, and many films and television shows have grown from them. Among the best are Ziniu Wu’s 1995 film Don’t Cry Nanking (also called Nanjing 1937), while Chuan Lu’s City of Life and Death (its original Chinese title being Nanjing! Nanjing!, for which no translation is necessary), released last year, is the most recent treatment of the Nanjing Massacre.

And in Europe, a brief but intensely bloody war broke out between Finland and the Soviet Union in November 1939, following the latter’s signing of a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. The Winter War, as it was called, involved nearly a million Soviet soldiers, perhaps a third as many Finns and a few units of White Guards left over from the Russian Civil War. The Soviets suffered proportionally much greater losses, for Joseph Stalin had been busy purging the Red Army of experienced officers throughout the 1930s, and the political commissars who took their place did not have had the skills needed to survive in the cold of the taiga and forest. No one knows how many died. The Soviets eventually prevailed, but when World War II broke out the Finns, now allied with Germany, returned with a vengeance to fight the Continuation War.

The conflicts are well remembered in Finland today. Pekka Parikka’s 1989 film Talvisota (The Winter War) was nominated for the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival for its fine portrayal of a reserve unit pressed into the thick of the fighting. Åke Lindman’s 2004 film Framom främsta linjen (Beyond Enemy Lines), for example, charts the misfortunes of a Swedish-speaking unit during the war on the Karelian Peninsula, where the conflict was often simply an alternately icy, alternately muddy war of attrition. Lindman drew on the living memories of veterans to make his film, and it has been praised for its realism. Lindman returned in 2007 with Tali-Ihantala 1944, portraying one of the final episodes of the Continuation War. The Russo-Finnish wars seem to have appealed less to Russian filmmakers, though the Russo-Finnish coproduction Rukajärven tie (Ambush) does an effective job of depicting war in all its brutality.